


Coil

by DwarvenBeardSpores



Series: twisty twink falls for stone butch coffin [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-typical people getting eaten by the powers, Feeding, Horror, Identity Issues, Other, Rain, Repetition, Romance, Singing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:54:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22582867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DwarvenBeardSpores/pseuds/DwarvenBeardSpores
Summary: The Coffin dreams of the hot, clenched core of the Earth, so dense it pulls all others in close. It dreams of gravity. It dreams that Michael will be caught in its pull.-In which the Coffin is charmed.
Relationships: The Coffin (The Magnus Archives)/Michael (The Magnus Archives)
Series: twisty twink falls for stone butch coffin [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1625002
Comments: 20
Kudos: 86





	Coil

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all, I’m back, because I love these monstrous identity-crisis more-than-avatar partners. Because I have accidentally gotten far too invested in this ship. Because Holo put the question to me after reading _Open_ about what the Coffin gets out of this relationship and uh... it turns out I had 2,000+ words of answer. 
> 
> This fic deals with themes of the Buried and the Spiral, and a couple of innocent people get eaten, so tread with appropriate caution. 
> 
> Also... it’s romantic.

It rains; sky filling with water, earth filling with water, everything filling with water and pressing in closer. Deeper. Heavier. The Coffin delights. The Coffin wakes from its slumber and sings back to the rain. 

It does not sing to call things in. There is no need because soon, someday, someone will come. The lock is always waiting to be turned, the coffin lid to be opened, the stairs always lead down. The Buried has only to swallow. 

The Coffin sings for itself. 

These days, the Coffin is moved and carried by strange hands and stranger bodies. It does not remember when the journey started, and it does not know when it will end. It is lost. Eventually, it will return to the embrace of the Buried, and there it will rest. 

The one who comes is already trapped and afraid, squeezed into a shape that it does not want. It is the Distortion in the same way the Coffin is the Buried; a mouth and a throat and not truly a whole. Too new to have settled into itself. It noses at the Coffin’s space, admires the stairwell. The Coffin is rarely admired by those whose hands are not already made of clay. 

It says its name is Michael. 

Michael is not afraid of the Coffin. It does not have to be. It is afraid of the choke of existence. This fear the Coffin can absorb just as well, though Michael's is unusual. Sharp. It seeps through wood and dirt until the Coffin is saturated with a feeling that pinches and squirms like something truly alive. 

Michael taps at the lid with one long finger and the Coffin does the only thing it can do. It gags up a long, chitinous leg from its depths to scratch with the noise of fingernails on unforgiving wood. It does this when it wants people to know it is there. 

The Distortion taps again, and again, and the Coffin continues to tell it _I’m here. I hear you. I am._

“You’re very eloquent,” Michael says, and laughs, and laughs. “And you most certainly _are.”_

The Coffin has been drowsy, half-sleeping as it is passed hand to hand to box to hand, waking only for the rain. When Michael leaves it is fully awake. The sky is clear and the air is thin and the Coffin sings. 

\-- 

The Coffin is lost, but the Distortion’s Michael finds it again, and again, and again. Sometimes, Michael acts surprised, sometimes resentful, often aloof. The Distortion lies, and the Coffin does not mind. Lies are words that hang heavy on the chest. 

No matter what it says, Michael talks, until the air is thick with speech. The Coffin has never needed silence, only found it, and it is glad, now, to find noise. To its recipients (and the recipients have stopped; there is only an open road) and to the deliverymen, the Coffin is a burden. It _loves_ to be a burden. This is its purpose. But Michael chooses to visit. Michael _un-_ burdens. Michael talks to the Coffin as Breekon talks to Hope: familiar. Fond. Michael asks questions and listens for the answers. 

And the Coffin finds that it loves this too. 

\-- 

The crate around the Coffin cracks open as it falls to the ground. Outside, the air is thick and humid. The Coffin’s wood swells. A small crowd stares, stunned. There is one among them whose fear resonates deep into the ground, and this one the Coffin pulls. It is hungry. 

A wooden box has no limbs, a tunnel has no limbs, a throat has no limbs, but it knows how to make a hand reach for a lock and it knows how to make a key turn. The pavement is slick. The fear is cloying. The Coffin does not react to parts of itself falling away—lock to the ground, lid slid aside—because there are heavy boots stepping into its throat, a descent, a meal. The Buried grinds around the new body. 

“That was a good turn o’ fortune,” says Hope, lifting the Coffin back into the truck. It is these moments of transport, of suspension, that the coffin hates most of all. And it does not like its meals framed in terms of fortune. 

\-- 

The Distortion wakes it from slumber. The Coffin is still in the back of the delivery truck, unboxed, unhappy. Its presence presses heavily on the drivers. Michael sits beside it and calls it “Casket,” leans an unspooling elbow on its lid. 

Air moves deep in underground tunnels. Motion echoes off the walls. The Coffin’s voice rises from the deep. 

“I’ve been wondering where you were,” Michael says. 

Michael is a broken geode, different from all angles, incomplete and shining, shining. When it is happy, the world splinters into crooked pieces. The Coffin does not splinter, but the tunnels at the bottom of its stairs begin to coil. It lets Michael scratch shapes into its hard wood. Fractals join this palimpsest of scars that tell stories of fear and happenstance, and now affection. 

“Quite the traveler, aren’t you?” 

The Coffin sighs. It would prefer not to travel or, if it must, to have a destination. It is lost. The deliverymen get restless if they’re still for too long, but the Coffin loathes the pace. It likes to settle. 

Michael laughs. Its laughter fills the space like a physical thing, echoing off the metal walls. The empty truck begins to feel snug. “I suppose I should have expected nothing less from Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe. Your priorities have always been a bit narrow for my liking.” 

As it talks, beneath the truck’s tires, the ground shifts. Curls. Coils. The road twists into a tightening spiral, and the deliverymen are not yet aware. It will take time for them to get trapped. Time to get back out. Time will pass and they will barely move anywhere. 

The Coffin hums. Michael does not answer. 

The road continues to narrow. 

\-- 

The Coffin dreams of the hot, clenched core of the Earth, so dense it pulls all others in close. It dreams of gravity. It dreams that Michael will be caught in its pull. 

\-- 

The deliverymen have run into a complication around something that stinks of the Filth. They’re waiting. Mumbling something over dark boxes in the newspaper. On edge. Burdened. 

The Coffin settles. 

A door creaks open and Michael steps out. “You’re in just the right spot, Casket,” it says. The air swirls. “There’s a man here, who I’ve been playing with for years and who is _achingly_ resistant to my particular charms. One man who simply will not be distorted. I’ve picked the wrong player.” 

There’s something weighted in that last sentence, something that goes deeper than frustration. A prickling in Michael’s usual aura of fear. The Coffin does not know what it is. Michael would not explain if asked, but it doesn’t matter; the Coffin takes the fear in anyway. 

"Tonight, I’m bringing things to an end.” Michael lays the part of itself that is body over the top of the coffin. The part of it that is not body coils and coils and coils. “I will send him through one last maze and then be done. And that isn’t all, Casket. That’s never all.” It laughs like a tiny earthquake, mouth pressed against the Coffin’s lid. 

“I’m going to give him to you,” Michael says. It twists the insides of the Coffin’s lock until the lock snaps open. The chain falls to the floor. The lid shifts. 

The Coffin hums. It has been hungry. It has been craving one touched by the Distortion. 

Michael giggles. “Oh, yes. Tonight, Casket, you will be the heart of my labyrinth.” 

Deep below, the Buried coils and coils and coils. 

\-- 

That night is like a dream. Like but not, which is what Michael is good at. The truck melts away into thick walls of metal and stone; the Coffin sits unmoving at their center. The space has changed but the Coffin is not lost. Lamps burn warm and cold over thick soft rugs. Doors painted in peeling excitement open and close and open. Footsteps echo around corners. Across miles. 

Michael had said to sing. Said that this maze would, eventually, have a solution. The Coffin's song is a landslide. The Coffin’s song is an inevitability. The Coffin sings to call the man in. 

Michael’s footsteps echo through the labyrinth as well. They fade in and out, but always they are recognizable, the step of seven feet just out of synch. This is a joint effort; Michael chases while the Coffin lures. The hallways shift, then shift again. The Buried churns. Those already trapped below gasp and ache and fear as they are crushed in new ways, as they are shifted to make room. Again, the hallways change. The footsteps spiral closer. The Coffin sings. 

And then the man is near, soaked in sweat, heart throbbing as though it cannot be contained. He needs rest. He _fears_ rest. He turns corners and corners, drawing closer to the song. The call of the Buried is sweet and thick. 

He stumbles. Tries a door that will not open. Laughs in a way entirely too mundane as he tries another, and another. There is a reason Michael has been having trouble with him, the reason for its prickling fear. There is too much joy in his bewilderment, in his twisting. He is a man who has been waiting his whole life to tumble through a doorway, who carries the thrill the Distortion in his heart. He could serve. One more choice, one right door, and he could _become._

And Michael does not want to become him in return. 

While he gasps his way through the hallways, the labyrinth closes tight around this man’s lungs. He is scarred by pressure. Trapped in mundanity and obligation. Stagnant. Stuck. He fears the dead end with a choking dread that draws him closer and closer towards the Coffin. This maze has no escape. 

A door opens and a body falls inward. He scrabbles. The door closes. Locks. The Coffin moans. He looks up, and his fear falls like a boulder, pinning his chest. 

A coffin has no limbs, a trap has no limbs, a throat has no limbs, but it knows how to make leaden legs step forward, how to clutch a trembling heart until it is heavy and still. 

“D-do... do not open,” the man reads. “Do not open. _Do not open._ ” He says it as though he’s trying to convince himself of something. The opening or the unopening. Michael would know. It doesn’t matter. 

Step by step, choking with fear, the man opens one last door. It closes behind him. The Buried swallows. 

Michael is the walls all around and Michael is standing behind the Coffin to watch, and Michael's laugh unspools, free and desperate, into the air. 

The Coffin raises its voice; it has never felt so pleased. 

\-- 

It is raining when the Coffin wakes. The day is quiet. Thick drops of water hit the roof of the truck, which is moving again. The Coffin is lost. Breekon and Hope grumble at the windshield wipers. 

The Coffin sings for itself. When it sleeps, it dreams of a labyrinth. 

\-- 

Michael is twisting the air in the corners of the truck. It always comes back, even when it says it won’t. The Distortion lies and the Coffin does not mind. 

“Casket,” it begins, then stops. Giggles apprehensively. “Things are always changing.” 

The Coffin moans. Michael is feeling eroded. Weathered. Exposed. 

“I’m going to leave if you’re going to be like that,” Michael says. It creeps closer until the edges of its fractals barely skim the Coffin’s surface. “And you know less than you think you know.” 

The Coffin does not fight, but it does not concede the point. It is not threatened, either, if Michael had been going for threatening. It sits and lets Michael’s fear soak deep into its roots. 

“I don’t--” 

Then the Coffin hums. It likes the taste of those touched by the Distortion. It will swallow them all, if it can, and Michael may lie but Michael must also know. 

A tunnel has no limbs, a throat has no limbs, a Casket has no limbs, and Michael’s limbs barely count either. Still, the Coffin knows how to draw in the Distortion like water down a drain, how to hold a spiraling heart until it is heavy. Not still, no, but resting. 

Michael sighs. Leans its head forward until it bumps against the Coffin. “You can be endearing.” Michael lies. The Coffin is always endearing. “I suppose I can feed you again, if you want. We were menacing together. I think I liked it.” 

The Coffin’s voice rises from the deep and it sings softly in agreement. 

Michael scratches another spiral into the Coffin’s lid. Breekon and Hope make a wrong turn. The Coffin is not lost. 

Once again, it begins to rain. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I’d love to know what you thought. 
> 
> You can also find me on tumblr as dwarven-beard-spores, twitter as @beardspores, and sometimes dreamwidth as DwarvenBeardSpores (I'm working on what to do with that one).


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